Politics is going on without us.
You remember my friend who liked to tease people by saying the university or the church would be a nice place if there were a way to get rid of all those people. At least we thought he was teasing.
But clearly the US senate, at least on the Repub side, has the same opinion. The only way to explain what they do is that they think they are all alone on the planet, acting in their own interests. Far from disregarding the wishes of voters, they seem unaware that voters even HAVE wishes except when they ask their staffs to frame up some speeches for rallies. To them voters are a great mass out there in a dark beyond the spotlights.
Being set apart in the chambers of the senate has led the senators to think they are a special category. Almost like celebrities, which easily slips over into being royalty. Pretty soon, noticing how they themselves eat differently and never have to walk, they begin to think they are a different species and possibly even immortal, considering that they should be dead by now. Being demented doesn’t count as dead so long as you can pay staff and get to a vote. (Voting — what a nuisance.)
It was almost more reassuring when the big shots in the Congress were likely to be American Aristocrats like the Kennedys, conveniently overlooking roots in crime and branches in sex play with mafia molls. Just like mega “churches” that pretend to be moral, esp. the ones with much respected fathers now gone, so they can’t curb their sons. Daughters and wives say nothing. The patterns that develop are so inevitable that they must have deep biological components, something that works against facts and logic.
Medium.com gives a home to writers who are explaining what the experts and scholars know but that old-fashioned denominations and even backwards congregations will forbid their leaders to tell the people in the pews. One of the most interesting authors is Jonathan Poletti “ I’m Jonathan. Let’s talk God. I’m the #1 religion blogger on Medium. I set out to get facts on the Bible and Christian history. It’s not what you hear in church!’
A friend of mine, because of Jonathan, has recently realized that “Lilith”, that “threesome” character who plagued Adam and Eve, is historically various but still haunts today’s thought, maybe as a “bunny burner” or a “bra burner.” Some versions, esp. if written by femnists, may reintepret her as virtuous. So far as I know, no one has written a story from the snake’s point of view, nor interpreted the snake as female.
Jonathan is not afraid to talk about sex and the whole issue of flesh versus spirit, carefully documenting. He can investigate puzzling sexual identities and the way different times create different tropes. No panic.
Explore google a bit for a long list of books about all this, some of it fiction and some serious scholarship. Most recognize “atheism” is a variation on “theism”, formed by exploring contradiction. Prefix and suffix play give us pantheism, monotheism, and so on.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=other+wriers+about+religion&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
There is no equivalent for politic organization, though there’s a lot of similarity with religion. It’s as though we are afraid that straightforward conviction will break open the whole democratic world. It might. Is the idea of a wise old man on a throne in the sky any more preposterous than a barricaded old demented man hiding in a woman’s mansion in Florida, dependent on a staff to clean his butt and manage him by singing Broadway hits? Ideas about him running for office again are fantasy produced by sycophants and secondary figures while they try to figure out where to go and what to do.
We’ve been conditioned by a zillion novels and movies to easily believe that every president or congressman has a lot to hide, some of it very seamy indeed. (Maybe not Jimmy Carter or Jon Tester.) It’s taken as an entitlement for powerful people to have access to a lot of sex that would normally be scorned. The same goes for the accumulation of obscene amounts of money. Money and sex are markers for importance in a world where anything more subtle requires actual thinking, maybe dialogue about values. It’s granted that sex and money workers just fake agreement.
What if all the congressmen just disappeared and the country went on without them. I suspect we’d get along just fine, with the exceptions of the mega-international corporations. Where they get their power and authority is an open question.
